Looking for a Place to Call Home: The Cultural and Gender Politics of Iranian Diasporic Women’s Cinema

This thesis maps an emerging cycle of films made by Iranian diasporic women filmmakers and produced outside of Iran, focusing on five significant examples: Shirin Neshat’s Women Without Men (2009), Sepideh Farsi’s Red Rose (2014), Maryam Keshavarz’s Circumstance (2011), Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) and Desiree Akhavan’s Appropriate Behaviour (2014). I argue that this cycle of films demonstrates a substantial shift within the existing diasporic paradigm, requiring analysis of intersectional relations not only between ethnicity, culture and nationality but also gender and sexuality. The central question of my study is how Iranian diasporic women’s films made outside of Iran re-envisage existing representations of female subjectivity and intercultural subject positions.